Bookbeat: February 2008

African
Americans and the Culture of Pain

In this study Debra Walker King considers fragments of experience
recorded in oral histories and newspapers as well as those produced
in
twentieth-century novels, films, and television that reveal how the
black body in pain functions as a rhetorical device and as political
strategy. King's primary hypothesis is that, in the United States,
black
experience of the body in pain is as much a construction of social,
ethical, and economic politics as it is a physiological phenomenon.

As an essential element defining black experience in America, pain
plays
many roles. It is used to promote racial stereotypes, increase the
sale
of movies and other pop culture products, and encourage advocacy
for
various social causes. Pain is employed as a tool of resistance against
racism, but it also functions as a sign of racism's insidious ability
to
exert power over and maintain control of those it claims--regardless
of
race. With these dichotomous uses of pain in mind, King considers
and
questions the effects of the manipulation of an unspoken but
long-standing belief that pain, suffering, and the hope for freedom
and
communal subsistence will merge to uplift those who are oppressed,
especially during periods of social and political upheaval. This
belief
has become a ritualized philosophy fueling the multiple constructions
of
black bodies in pain, a belief that has even come to function as
an
identity and community stabilizer.

In her attempt to interpret the constant manipulation and abuse
of this
philosophy, King explores the redemptive and visionary power of pain
as
perceived historically in black culture, the aesthetic value of black
pain as presented in a variety of cultural artifacts, and the
socioeconomic politics of suffering surrounding the experiences and
representations of blacks in the United States. The book introduces
the
term Blackpain, defining it as a tool of national mythmaking and
as a
source of cultural and symbolic capital that normalizes individual
suffering until the individual--the real person--disappears. Ultimately,
the book investigates America's love-hate relationship with black
bodies
in pain.

- Publisher

Cholera
and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England

Drawing from sermons, novels, newspaper editorials, poetry, medical
texts, and the writings of social activists, Cholera
and Nation explores
how the coming of the cholera epidemics during a period of intense
political reform in Britain set the terms by which the social body
would be defined. In part by historical accident, epidemic disease
and especially cholera became foundational to the understanding of
the social body. As the healthy body was closely tied to a particular
vision of nation and modernity, the unhealthy body was proportionately
racialized and othered. In turn, epidemic disease could not be separated
from issues of social responsibility, political management, and economic
unrest, which perpetually threatened the nation and its identity.
For the rest of the century, the emergent field of public health
would be central to the British national imaginary, defining the
nation's civilization and modernity by its sanitary progress.

- Publisher

"This is a very skillful example of historically sound
literary criticism; it combines attention to narrative with relevant
historical contextualization, and offers a detailed account of the
literary history of a subject not commonly treated through literature.
This is innovative and complements more conventional historical work
on the subject of public health and medicine in the Victorian period."

-
Antoinette Burton, editor of
Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and
the Writing of History